


Gasps / Blue (Small fascinations)

by kumulonimbus



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, widowhanzo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-14 00:21:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14124081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kumulonimbus/pseuds/kumulonimbus
Summary: They meet once a year, but never on Valentine’s day – how can they celebrate something they murdered?





	Gasps / Blue (Small fascinations)

They meet once a year. Or maybe more than just once, ever the unsung quip between two snipers soaring from rooftop to rooftop, perched legs around the corners and hands pressed hard against their weapons - but nothing more. They see each other rather frequently these days, though they only meet once a year. It’s the healthy competition, they know, the sort of healthy rivalry that always ends at somebody else’s funeral. Irony has become their clothes - it wraps up around them; sarcasm is their favorite type of underwear and she laughs, and he regrets it and she says: “One day your heart shall just break, Shimada.”

They meet once a year, or more than once - but only once it actually counts. The rest of the times, she says the words they want to hear her say even when she knows he’ll just say no like he always does. Still, she does not judge him for she knows his heart shall break in two one of these days. She doesn’t judge him, ever. Moral tribulations are way above her payroll anyways.

They only meet once a year because they have divided her memory and now there are things that she just can’t see. She lives in breathy gaps of fragments, speaks in spite of the echo in her ears - her tongue is a native of a land she does no longer possess. Now neither she nor he can’t quite remember how it all started or when or where or why - but they know they meet once a year. Once a year, a day off. Once a year they seek what they lack: company - but they seek a small dose of it, the only dose they can tolerate, the only dose they know they deserve. A minimum companion, a slap in the face of love, just an equally bewildering someone to remind him that, one day, his heart shall break in two.

Intimacy does not exist between them. There was a time when he tried, but the woman stopped him before he could even manifest the shadow of an intention. She knows that’s the limit for the woman she is now, that bitch is surely gonna die the most gruesome type of death and when mercy refuses to answer her call she’ll know: she’ll be ready to go alone. Her lack of a physical kind of love is her own atonement - for all that she’s done and for all that she shall do before her time is up.

Her emotions have been demoted to the field of basic deductions - she understands that a woman like her does not deserve any good things to come her way. He’s no good news. They both know he’s not a good thing coming her way. A man with a history as dark as hers is no good news, the flask of sake perpetually resting by his waist has become his only friend. Nothing good can come from him - still, they meet once a year. Once. Just once. In spite of themselves.

At least she likes being with him. Or, at least, she does not dislike his presence even if more than once she finds herself on the verge of pleading the man to cut the crap and just join Talon - but then she reconsiders, and realizes that getting to see the archer every single day could be the worst thing that could ever happen to them. So every time he denies their wish she smiles her little sighs of cheap satisfaction, knowing that deep down her own wishes have prevailed once more. At least that part of herself remains under her domain. That’s how it works for them, that’s what she demands from him and vice-versa: a small dose of company. The only tolerable dose.

What she likes the most about his company is not him, jealousy incarnate towards the one she is no longer. It’s these whimsical imitations to a feeling she once experienced, now removed from its context and forced to exist as a deductible abstraction of a nonexistent emotion, short-lived like a mouthful of air, persistent like the sound she makes every time she gasps and clings to nothing and everything at the same time. The echo lingers around her, reverberates across time and space - the voice suggests, and the echo obliges but she can only stand motionless in between. Who knows what he wants or what he needs - more often than not she gets the idea that her mere presence is more than enough for him. He has no ambitions - not earthy ones at least. She’s one of them. Once a year, she becomes one of his meaningless wishes.

They meet once a year only to remind themselves that what they did was wrong. That even if years have now stacked up upon their dresses their sins still endure, unwavering. They look at each other as if trying to find that missing fire only to remind themselves that pleasure lies unconscious in the dungeons they themselves created, their dignified cages where most liberties don’t even call them by their names anymore. Yet something still stirs inside - the memorization of a long-lost feeling, perhaps, or the chance of a glorified approximation to love. But instead of wasting her time trying to rekindle those old, humid ashes, the woman prefers to adapt to this new convalescence, as his presence begins to sprinkle sugar in her eyes for her skin to try to imitate the lukewarm mementos of an existence now dispossessed of all humanity. Her mind puts back together all those broken pieces of memories that still belong to her and her alone yet the images, shy in their compromised integrity, cannot bring back the one that is no more so her mind wanders adrift, caught in the middle of interrupted sensations, like warm gasps of air that can only create a tourbillion of shivering goosebumps across her nightly skin – it’s small, like a detail or a whimsical fixation, it’s a door that leads nowhere but then she knows it’s not the door, it’s its hinges. It’s a symphony of simple tribulations, a controlled repertoire of small fascinations, like the sound of the first button as it gets undone. Or like the unpredictable moment of complete stillness while a zipper makes a southern slide. All he has to give are small depictions of a very intricate intellectual showdown where his memories and her memories coalesce into a single fictitious past they never got to share – but the eclipse of recollections is as demanding as it is positively entertaining, like a never-ending chess game where they are supposed to save the other’s kings and queens, relegating all attacks to a distant moment that never comes. It’s more powerful than any aphrodisiac, more inciting than physical contact but beyond all this, they know fear lies ungraceful – so they live in and for the certainty of details, the unpredictable reality seems too far-fetched now.

Some dreams are worth keeping, they know.

Once a year they meet and do what they do, pretending to be some other woman and some other man only to realize that they are who they are. She uses makeup and covers up the blue with yet more artificiality. It’s not easy being blue in the streets of diversity where humans and omnics walk hand in hand. It’s not easy being blue without becoming melancholy or loneliness incarnate in a city full of people that don’t really know how to be alone. Once a year she doesn’t want to be blue. They meet once a year, and today he kisses her red lips as if trying to win the fight against her cold mouth – he says her colors are misleading, says her hues do not make any sense anymore and even though she can’t exactly feel, a part of her knows that if he keeps doing these things he does, sooner or later he’s going to try to wake up something inside, something that’s not particularly asleep, something long gone - something dead. She wants to yell at him to just stop doing what he does, she wants to make him see that it makes him both naïve and heartless at the same damn time – but she doesn’t, even if she knows about the long hours of torture that wait for her every time he tries to wake up something in her, the cage and the blindfold, the coldness and the steel. He surrounds her with his arms and says that she shouldn’t be afraid of fear, she should know a woman like her is not entitled to that emotion – but the fact that he even dares to toy with such a notion is even scarier than the notion itself.

The man brushes his hands lightly across her cheeks and the makeup she’s wearing impregnates his fingertips. He looks at them, then back at her as if clouds have rolled by only to reveal the blue skies hiding behind them. But then he smiles bitterly and mumbles to himself and his fingers return to her face, trying to fix her damaged landscape. Then he asks her why she stays with Talon, he says loyalty is not entirely an emotion but still, he says he just doesn’t understand. He says fear and loneliness might open up the gates for her to feel again and the woman smiles politely at him but she doesn’t say anything because she knows it’s not the door, it’s its hinges; she knows it’s not the body, it’s the sound of a button getting undone, it’s the slight pressure on one’s pelvis as a zipper slides down, it’s the seconds that follow that moment - one, two, a lifetime.

They meet once a year, but never on Valentine’s day – how can they celebrate something they murdered? But now that winter is almost gone, the time for paper hearts seems weaker somehow. “One day your heart shall just break, Shimada,” she says, and he regrets it, and she smiles, and he loves it. The irony has stolen all their clothes.


End file.
